WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said yesterday that the military should “continually”
review its prohibition on transgender people serving in the armed forces, calling into question
whether the Pentagon’s ban may one day be lifted, as was the ban on gay men and lesbians.

While such a reversal appears to be far in the future — the Pentagon’s stock talking points have
been that it is under continuous review — Hagel, appearing on ABC’s
This Week yesterday, pronounced himself open to a review of the policy and added, “Every
qualified American who wants to serve our country should have an opportunity if they fit the
qualifications and can do it.”

But he allowed that the transgender issue was “a bit more complicated because it has a medical
component to it.”

In the military, transgender service members can be summarily dismissed, as Defense Department
guidelines describe them as sexual deviants and their condition as “paraphilia,” with its
connotations of the atypical and extreme.

A panel affiliated with San Francisco State University estimated in March that more than 15,000
transgender individuals were serving in the military and the National Guard and Reserve. Officials
who worked on that study said that transgender people are overrepresented in the military, compared
with the rest of America, because many male-to-female transgender individuals enlist to try to
submerge their feminine sides, while many female-to-male transgender people enlist because they
want to be in a hypermasculine environment.

It remains unclear whether the military will seriously review its ban, and President Barack
Obama has not addressed the issue specifically. In 2011, speaking to a gay-rights group, Obama
said, “Every single American — gay, straight, lesbian, bisexual, transgender — every single
American deserves to be treated equally before the law.”